Fiddlehead

Twenty

“I thought we’d landed closer to the road than this,” Maria grumbled, tripping over a tree root and scraping her already-raw hand against a trunk when she caught herself.

“So did I.” Henry grimaced with pain, so often that it seemed his whole face was set that way in a permanent expression of discomfort. But a broken arm was plenty of excuse, to say nothing of the assorted scrapes, bumps, and bruises that plagued them both.

Maria ached in places she rarely thought of, and she bled from more injuries than she let on. Besides the cut on her head, under her coat she hid a hard puncture that had made it past her corset stays. She didn’t know how deep it went, and she didn’t know what had caused it. Part of the Black Dove, as they’d kicked free of its tumbling wreckage? A tree branch on the way down? Something else, when she’d landed?

The wound was under her rib cage, on the right side. It left a great stain on her dress, so she kept her coat fastened around herself, even tighter than before. Now it wasn’t just the cold. She needed for Henry to believe that she was all right, because if he thought otherwise, he’d attempt to coddle them both and they’d never get anywhere.

Just this once, she was glad for the cold.

It kept her numb enough to keep walking, hiking between the trees and around them. She hoped they were headed in the right direction, but had no way of knowing for certain. She had no compass, only Henry’s gut feeling; and she did her best not to second-guess him, because she had no idea herself.

Finally, they saw a line where the trees thinned. When they stumbled up out of the woods, they found themselves on a road. It amounted to little more than four sets of ruts in places, but the rain that season had been bad, and it was no secret that the Confederacy was low on money. Public works were suffering along with everything else.

No other vehicles or travelers were present, a fact that bothered Maria. She’d hoped to find carts—of the motorized or horse-drawn variety, she did not care which—and use her wiles to flag one down for a lift. She was exhausted and sore. Henry surely was in no better condition, though he also seemed to be hiding the worst of his pain.

So they trudged forward, southbound and surly, until a benevolent farmer heading in the right direction came along. Maria bribed him with sorrowful eyes, and Henry sealed the deal with the few Confederate coins from his pocket that hadn’t rained across the Georgia countryside as he’d fallen to earth.

The ride was faster than walking, and it gave them time to rest, if not recover.

When the farmer took a turn for the west, he left them on the road and they continued on foot, thankful for the help but wishing for more assistance. It didn’t come.

The day grew later, and the shadows grew longer. Maria didn’t know what they’d do when night fell. They had almost nothing in the way of supplies, much less any source of light, and roaming along a road at night was a surefire way to get robbed or murdered … or so she’d always been told.

She squeezed the battered satchel that still hung around her neck, and yes, her gun was still there. But none of her bullets had survived the trip, so whatever was in the wheel was all she had left. Henry had done better for himself: His shoulder holster was under his coat, and therefore his firearm and supplies had survived the trip more completely.

She doubted their guns would be of much use against the Maynard device, but they made her feel better all the same.

Another hour passed, and her feet were blocks of ice. Her nose had lost all feeling, and her injuries hurt terribly. Henry was flagged as well: His ordinarily fair complexion had gone positively white, his glasses were long gone, and when he wiped at his nose with one torn sleeve, it left a damp, bloody streak on the back of his arm.

And then they heard voices, accompanied by the crush and roll of large wheels on uneven turf. Not far ahead, there were people. Carts. Horses.

And then the dome of the big black cargo dirigible came into view.

Henry stopped and took her arm. “Let’s leave the road. Come around to the side.”

“You want to sneak up on them?”

“I want to watch them before we try to engage. We might learn something. Spot a weak point. If we walk up to them now, they’ll shoot us before we get close.”

She wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t fight him when he led her off the tracks that passed for a highway and back into the trees. They circled quietly around, staying just beyond the clearly visible road, until they were within earshot.

The caravan had stopped. Only a few minutes of eavesdropping told them why.

“Goddamn this road! How does anyone ever move anything?”

“There’s not much left to move,” someone said wryly, but not loudly. “The state’s bankrupt—the whole country’s bankrupt. Hell, I’m just I’m glad there’s any road at all. We could be stuck hacking our way through the woods, and then what?”

“Then we’d be stuck in this hellhole forever,” griped someone close. “How are we going to get this thing going again? Frank said we can’t push the crawler’s motor any harder, or we’ll blow it.”

“Then we won’t push the crawler’s motor any harder,” said a new voice—someone who spoke with a commanding bent.

Maria strained to see him, but between the trees she saw nothing but a flash of gray uniform and a shock of hair beneath a cap that looked like it might be red. “There’s the man in charge,” she guessed aloud to Henry, who nodded.

The man in charge said, “We’ll have to dig ourselves out.”

“You’re sure the ship can’t lift us?”

“You saw us try it. Did it work? No? Then yes, I’m sure the ship can’t lift us. We can’t burn through its hydrogen, anyway. Not if we want a way home, when all’s said and done.”

“Sir, we’re … we’re fish in a barrel if we stay in the middle of this road.”

“Heavily armed fish in a military convoy. Pull yourself together, and get a shovel.”

“Do we have shovels?”

“Check with the ship; they might have some. If not, we’ll improvise. We have axes, and we have a whole forest full of wood we can commandeer if we have to. Bring me Lieutenant Engel, and I’ll see what exactly we have at our disposal.”

Henry leaned over and whispered into Maria’s ear. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll wander away from the caravan. We may have to swipe him, but we’ll make him listen to us.”

“We’re a pitiful pair of kidnappers, you and I.”

“We’re armed. We don’t have to overpower him, just surprise him.”

“Is that our plan?” she asked.

“It’s a possibility. Should we split up?”

She thought about it and said, “We could, but let’s not. We’d just double our chances of getting caught.”

He nodded. “All right. Let’s go together, then.”

Forward they crept, staying low and working toward the giant rolling-crawler—a Texian-made monstrosity that operated on floating axles, and was renowned for its ability to traverse uneven terrain. Apparently it wasn’t quite advanced enough for Georgia roads, which made Maria smile ruefully until she drew near enough to really look at the thing. It was huge—bigger than any such contraption she’d ever seen before, in the North or South. Six wheels on three axles, and about as tall as a single-story building, except for the back portion, which was open like a cart.

This segment was occupied by something huge and—if the set of the wheels in the road was any gauge—quite heavy. The rear half was bogged down, oversized tires lodged into fresh ruts that had been made all the deeper by their spinning, digging, lunging efforts to free the thing.

“Can you see it?” Henry asked, craning his neck.

“They’ve covered it up with something. We’ll have to get closer, though it may be dangerous.”

“We might … not have much choice,” he said slowly, turning his head sharply but carefully to the right.

Maria followed his new gaze, and was horrified to see a gray-dressed soldier with a large army-issue rifle. The rifle was long-barreled with its hardware in gleaming condition, and it was aimed directly at them.

He said, “Hello there. I’d ask what we have here, except I can make myself a guess.”

“It’s not what it looks like,” she promised him.

“It’s not two people spying on a military caravan?” he asked with a smirk.

Maria instantly disliked him, not that there was anything she could do about it. “No, it’s not that. Not exactly.”

Henry stood up straight from his crouch, and said, “I’m a U.S. Marshal, and I’m here to help. I’m going to get my badge out of my coat, see? I’m not drawing a gun.”

“U.S. Marshal my ass. Don’t you dare move.” Over his shoulder he shouted, “Hey, Captain, I’ve got something over here!”

“What?”

“A couple of spies; come and see ’em,” he called. “One says he’s a marshal.”

“A marshal?”

Seconds later the captain appeared—and, yes, it was the red-haired man they’d identified before, in a well-fitting uniform, as opposed to those of his subordinates. He was handsome in a way that red-haired men tended not to be, in Maria’s experience—though there was always an exception to the rule, and here he was. His eyes were cool, intelligent, and very blue.

Another gray-uniformed man appeared with him, and now they were outnumbered.

“Captain,” Henry said, not bothering to address anyone anymore, except the man who made the decisions. “My name is Henry Epperson and I’m with the U.S. Marshals Service. I was sent here by the president himself, with regards to Project Maynard.”

Maria gave him a bit of side-eye. She wasn’t sure she would’ve played it so on the nose, but between the pair of them, he was the one most likely to be listened to, so she chose to trust him. It was too late to do anything else, anyway.

“The president?” The captain huffed a small, incredulous laugh. “If you’ve got word from President Grant, then why are you sneaking up on us, hiding in the woods? And furthermore, let me see your badge.”

“It’s here in my coat pocket,” he said again, fumbling for it with his good hand, and finding it this time. He tossed it to the captain.

While the captain examined it, Maria answered the rest. “We’re sneaking up on your caravan because the big cargo ship you’re traveling with shot us down a few miles back down the road. You’ll have to forgive us if we weren’t fully committed to approaching you openly—not while that thing docks overhead.”

“Shot you down?” he frowned, and glanced back toward the road. “So that’s what all the commotion was about. We heard it, but couldn’t see it for the trees.” Over the trees they could all see the craft’s dome, bobbing slowly in the dying wind. “Why would they shoot you down? Why would…”

The man obviously had more questions, but maybe he had answers, too—and he didn’t like them much. He tossed the badge back to Henry, who caught it with a fast jab of his hand. “What about you?” he asked. “You’re not a marshal, are you, ma’am?”

“No, sir, I’m not. I’m a Pinkerton agent, hired by Abraham Lincoln. This marshal and I have been working together with regards to this project you’re transporting to Atlanta—and I do note that you didn’t contradict us, or argue, when Henry called it by its proper name. You’re Union soldiers, the lot of you. Blue wearing gray, undertaking a top secret mission to deploy a terrible weapon in Atlanta. You know it. We know it. And the president knows it, too. He’s trying to stop it.”

“Ma’am,” he said, adjusting his hat and shifting his weight. He lowered his voice, but not much. “This project is as top secret as they come, or so we’re told. If you’re Confederate spies, you’re not very good ones—traveling alone and naming names, when you ought to play dumb and ask for help. But your badge looks like the real thing,” he said to Henry, “and if you say the president sent you, then that’s either the stupidest tall tale you could pull out of your ear on a moment’s notice, or it’s the truth.”

Maria wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but she didn’t dare, not yet. “Captain, we came here to warn you. The project is more dangerous than you know: It’s a suicide mission for you and your men, authorized through unofficial channels, and paid for by a warhawk tycoon with the help of the Secretary of State.”

The captain’s lovely eyes narrowed, and he crossed his arms. “Is that so?”

“Who gave you your orders? And don’t answer me—I’m asking you to ask yourself. Did it come from the top? Or from some underling who professed to speak with presidential authority?”

“The Secretary of State is hardly an underling, really.”

Maria stood to her full height and brushed scraps of forest floor off her battered dress. “He’s an underling to the president, who is scrambling, sir—absolutely scrambling—to put a stop to this project. And if I were to wager a guess, I’d say that his wasn’t the name on your orders. The cargo craft that accompanies you—I saw through their window with a spyglass. They’re Baldwin-Felts agents, hired by this warhawk tycoon.”

“But acting with the authority of…” His voice trailed off as he pondered the implications. The captain’s two juniors exchanged a worried glance, but their officer didn’t take his eyes off Maria, who refused to blink or retreat. “So you two … you’re the ones tasked with the mission of reaching us? And giving us this message?”

Henry responded, “There were half a dozen potential deployment locations, and no one could—or would—say exactly where the weapon was headed. Washington, D.C., is in disarray, Captain. At this time, it stands as divided as the nation. The president wants to bring the war to an end, but he’s being hampered and hindered on all sides by those who would profit from it.”

Again the captain looked up at the cargo dirigible, deliberating. “The men in that ship—they’re Baldwins, you’re right about that. They’re supposed to be our supply and evacuation team.”

“They’re trusting you to civilians?” Maria asked.

To which he replied pointedly, “Last I heard, Pinkertons were civilians as well, ma’am, and you profess to work on behalf of the District yourself. And I don’t believe I caught your name, but I know your accent isn’t any farther north than the line.”

“Maria.” Then she swallowed hard and said, “Maria Boyd. I come from Virginia, but I work from Chicago.”

If he recognized her name, he didn’t react to it. All he said was, “All right, then, Miss Boyd and Mr. Epperson. You know an awful lot about what we’re doing.”

“More than you do,” she said urgently. “Please, you have to listen to us, Captain … Captain, I don’t believe I caught your name, either.”

“MacGruder,” he told her. “I’m commanding officer for this operation, such as it is,” he added unhappily, gazing toward the trapped rolling-crawler.

“Captain MacGruder,” she said, turning the name over in her mouth, feeling the letters tumble together and thinking that it sounded familiar—very familiar—but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Finally, she gave up and asked, “Do you know what the weapon does?”

He hesitated. Maria thought that it must not be that he didn’t know, but that he wasn’t sure how much to tell her. “It’s a bomb. An advanced bomb that will do … untold damage.” He said it like he was confessing to himself. “But it’s a bomb that can end the war, like the president wants—and that is my mission. These are my orders.”

“No, sir, that isn’t your mission, and your orders were falsified. That weapon is a bomb, yes, and it will do far worse than untold damage—but it won’t end the war, you can safely bet on that. Katharine Haymes is readying herself to make a fortune on a gamble that this bomb works well enough to become the talk of the town, but not well enough to end a goddamn thing.”

“Haymes?” The captain looked startled. “That’s a name I know.”

Henry said, “You ought to. She killed hundreds of Union prisoners at a camp in Tennessee.”

“With gas,” he said thoughtfully. “She did it with gas; I heard about that. I tried to tell people, but they didn’t want to hear it.…”

“Hear what?” Maria asked. “Tell people what?”

He shook his head. “I told my superiors that I’d seen that kind of devastation before. I’d reported it once already … not that anyone listened then, either. What she did, that weapon she tested.… But, wait, I thought she was a Confederate?”

Maria shook her head. “No, she claims no nation. She belongs to whichever side can pay her best, and we both know that means she’s working for the Union now. That thing you accompany, it’s a gas bomb of such a size that it could wipe out half of Atlanta, including whoever’s nearby when it’s released. You’ll never escape it. There won’t be time.”

“But, the cargo ship…” The soldier with the rifle asked the captain, “The ship’ll pull us out, won’t it?”

“How?” Maria demanded, addressing him once more, rather than the handsome captain. “That thing isn’t big enough to hold the lot of you, and someone would have to stay behind and set the bomb off, anyway.”

The captain argued with her, but without much conviction. “We’re going to shoot it from the air. It’s a big enough target. But … I’ve wondered.” Then he muttered, like he couldn’t shake the significance, “If it’s … a gas bomb…”

“And one that doesn’t just kill…” Henry continued.

“It’s the walking plague.” The captain said the words softly, almost under his breath. “It’s a bomb that gives people … that turns them into the living dead. That’s what this is, isn’t it? The walking plague is created by a weapon.”

“Well, yes and no,” Henry said. He might’ve said more—asking how the captain had drawn such a conclusion, correct though it might well be—but at that moment Maria had a revelation.

Two thoughts had been bouncing around in her brain, ever since the captain had identified himself: his name, and where she might’ve heard it before. Those two ideas finally collided, crashing together so that the sparks illuminated the truth. She blurted out, “You’re the Captain MacGruder from the nurse’s notes!”

Everyone froze, mostly from confusion. The captain asked her, “I’m sorry, nurse? What nurse?”

“On the train,” she continued excitedly. “The Dreadnought—you were on the Dreadnought! I read about it!”

He recoiled, stunned. “Read about it? Where on earth could you have read about it? No one’s written about it except for me—and what I wrote went ‘missing,’ according to anyone I asked,” he said angrily. “I tried to tell them! The walking plague doesn’t just walk among soldiers, and it isn’t confined to the front.”

“But it is you,” Maria persisted. “You were the Union captain the nurse trusted, who survived what happened in Utah. Just admit it!”

“The nurse,” he muttered, flailing to find the context she prodded him for. “There … there was a nurse, yes. Mercy, that was her name. She … she wrote a book? She’s alive? I tried to find her, but the ranger, the nurse, the Rebs who made it out alive … everyone’s gone. Reassigned, they told me,” he recounted bitterly. “Secret missions. Secrets everywhere, no one talking, no one listening. No one left. All of them, gone.”

“And you’ll be gone, too, if you finish this mission. We all will.”

The forest whistled and shook, as the wind gave one last gasp through the trees, scattering what was left of the leaves and tweaking the brittle branches. No one spoke while they watched the captain reflect, consider, think, and finally … conclude.

He gave a good, hard glare at the cargo ship through the trees and said, “Get me Frankum. I need to speak with him. You two—Miss Boyd, Marshal—come with me. Graham, Simmons, keep an eye on them.”

Maria began to protest. “But we’re—”

“I’m not taking any chances.”

So, at gunpoint, they followed the captain up the side of the hill, onto the road, and into the middle of the caravan—where they were greeted with stares and gossipy whispers.

The captain announced, “Gentlemen, we have guests: a U.S. marshal and a Pinkerton agent, pulled from the woods like foundlings. They were left there courtesy of Captain Frankum, or so they tell me. So, where is our fine, upstanding dirigible pilot, eh?”

Something about his pronunciation of “fine” and “upstanding” implied a keen sense of irony.

Maria and Henry kept close to each other, nearly back-to-back. No one had taken their firearms, which might be construed as a lack of caution on Captain MacGruder’s part, except that they had nowhere to go, and they weren’t likely to stage a gun-blazing escape in their battered state.

“You two, over here,” one of their guards told them, gesturing with the barrel of his gun. He guided them to the big rolling-crawler, and suggested they should stand against it and wait for further instructions. “Captain? Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he answered vaguely, and stomped off to the far edge of the convoy, where Maria could no longer see him.

She didn’t like it, and Henry didn’t, either, but they did as they were told. They put their backs to the thing and tried not to think about what was inside it, now only inches from their bodies. Maria fancied that she could hear a hum, some strained, coursing sound from within. She could feel it better than she could hear it, as the vibrations rattled at her ribs. It was almost as if the bomb were a living thing, with pulse and respiration and a sense of urgency—an awful destiny that it wanted to fulfill.

Maria banished her imagination’s wanderings and closed her eyes, exhausted. She wanted to sit down, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so, not while so much danger remained … and she didn’t know what form it was likely to take, or even where it might come from.

But she was so, so tired. And so very sore. And she so very badly wanted to sleep.

Eventually, Captain Frankum appeared in their midst, joined by two of his fellow airmen. The captain himself was a short, sturdy man without an ounce of fat on him, but a squared-off appearance that indicated a great deal of muscle. He was no more handsome or friendly looking up close than he had been in the clouds, nor were either of his men.

Captain MacGruder also returned from whatever errand he’d wandered off to. His face was set in a firm expression, all business and ready for conflict—an effect that was slightly undone, in Maria’s opinion, by the pink flush across his nose, brought on by the cold.

“Frankum, there you are. I’ve got a question for you,” he said.

At approximately that precise moment, Frankum noticed the newcomers. At first, his eyes glanced past them, but he did flash a quick second look at Maria. It could’ve meant anything: He might have recognized her from the sky, or maybe he was only confused at seeing a woman there.

“Who are they?” the Baldwin-Felts man asked.

Captain MacGruder feigned innocence. “You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why’d you shoot them down a few hours ago?”

“Why did I…?”

“You heard me,” MacGruder said, coming in closer. He leaned forward, craning over the shorter man and casting a shadow over him. “Why did you shoot them down? What we have here, Captain”—spitting out the word like it tasted bad—“is a U.S. Marshal and another agent, sent as messengers from the White House.”

Maria appreciated that he’d left out the “Pinkerton” part, given how little love was lost between the two firms. It meant he was thoughtful for her safety, perhaps; or it meant that he was smart, and didn’t feel like adding the extra trouble to the mix.

“A marshal? Why would the president send a marshal?” Frankum tried to redirect the inquiry, but he didn’t do it smoothly—and before the crisis could be forced any further, he gave up the pretense of innocence. “I didn’t have any way of knowing who they were. Besides, you have your orders, I have mine. Mine say to keep all crafts away from this convoy, and I was doing my job.”

“Mr. Epperson,” Captain MacGruder said to Henry, but kept his eyes on Frankum. “Were you flying in a federal craft? Did you make any attempt to identify yourself?”

“A federal craft in Confederate airspace? No, for Christ’s sake. And we weren’t given the opportunity to identify ourselves; we were attacked without warning upon approach.”

Frankum flashed a quick glance at the sky. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he asked, “Wait a minute. Where’s Kramer?”

“Kramer?” Henry echoed.

“Captain Kramer,” Frankum said crossly. “He was following us out, in his little supply ship. He stayed behind us; he was supposed to…”

“To what?” Maria demanded. “Kill us? Shoot us down? I hate to disappoint you—or, rather, I don’t mind it in the slightest: We survived that encounter somewhat more cleanly than we survived our dustup with your craft. The ashes of that other ship are, at present, raining down softly over Georgia.” She added a fluttering motion with her numb, bruised fingers for emphasis.

“You took it down? In your little two-seater?”

“She’s a mighty good shot.” Henry was exaggerating, but Maria was pleased nonetheless.

“Look, look, look.” Frankum held out his hands, both attempting to defend himself and shush everyone else. “What I want to know is, how do we know these two came from the District? And why are you so fast to assume they’re telling the truth? You’re just going to let them waltz out of the woods and derail this operation? This very expensive operation, months in the planning? I don’t guess they had anything with the presidential seal on them?”

Henry said, “No, but—”

“So we take their words for it? Blow the whole mission, on the word of two spies?”

“We aren’t—”

But MacGruder interrupted, “No, I’m not willing to blow the whole mission. But I am willing to delay it a bit. I don’t even have much choice, given that we still have to extract this damn thing from the road,” he said, scowling at the rolling-crawler. “Texian technology … you’d think it could handle a Southern road. Jesus. Anyway, since we’ve got a minute, I just now put Bradley on a fast horse to Atlanta, to the taps there.”

“But the taps are down, all over the place,” the air captain argued.

“Yes, but if they’re up again anywhere, they’ll be up in the city. We’ll just take a break and ask the president ourselves what he wants us to do.”

“But, but, that’ll take hours!” Frankum sputtered. “And you can’t just send the president a note and wait for orders—you already have orders!”

“And I’m following them, until I hear differently,” MacGruder said coolly. “But it’ll take an hour or more to get this damn cart dug out, and once we’re back on the road—well, at our pace we’re lucky if it’s another four hours to the city. Bradley ought to catch us before we reach it, and we can reevaluate the matter depending on what he says.”

Frankum stayed calm, but his men were getting antsy. Maria watched them fidget and exchange nervous glances, though their captain’s expression was a fierce threat to maintain their composure. The man to his left lost it first. He asked, “Hours?”

The word was small, but it was almost too frightened to be heard.

“Hours,” MacGruder nodded.

“We don’t have hours.”

“Shut up,” Frankum said to his man. Then, to MacGruder, “Hours aren’t in the plan, and you know it.”

“Plans change.”

“You’re stalling.”

“I am stalled,” Captain MacGruder declared. “And what does it matter if we reach Atlanta come sundown? The city will go to hell as easily at dusk as midday.”

Frankum shook his head, and his eyes darted back and forth between his crewmen. “We were supposed to be there by now. We should’ve been halfway back to the Mason-Dixon by now.”

“Plans change. We adapt. Without flexibility, we’re all doomed to fail.”

“I’m not,” Frankum insisted. “And I have obligations elsewhere. I don’t have to hover with you fools while you get your act together.” He snapped his fingers, and pointed at the cargo craft. “You two, get back in the ship. We’re taking off.”

“No, you’re not,” MacGruder said, flatly.

“We need more hydrogen; we’ve burned off too much sitting around waiting for your men to fix this. If we don’t go get more, we won’t have enough to pick you up and get us all clear of the blast.”

“You’re not leaving this caravan until everybody leaves it.”

Maria saw an opportunity to deepen the wedge between them, and she seized it. “That was never part of the plan,” she blurted out. All eyes turned to her, so she said it again. “It was never part of the plan for any of you to survive the trip.”

MacGruder came forward, until he stood directly in front of her. “Out in the woods you said this was a suicide mission for me and my men.”

“That’s right. That’s one reason the president rejected the program.”

“There were others?”

“Once he learned what the weapon really does, yes. President Grant doesn’t want to create a legion of walking dead men any more than you do.”

As she spoke, Frankum and his men began a slow retreat, designed to keep from attracting too much attention.

It didn’t work. MacGruder’s men stopped them with rifles primed, promising violence if anyone tried to leave the area. The captain himself whirled around on one heel, stomped up to Frankum, and seized him by the collar. He dragged the pilot off his feet, pulling him forward, and slamming him up against the nearest cart.

Frankum’s eyes bugged out, darting frantically back and forth. He sought his men but found only MacGruder’s face wearing a very big frown.

“Is she telling the truth? Were you supposed to leave us here?”

“You don’t understand…”

“So help me understand. She’s telling the truth—she is, or you wouldn’t be writhing like a worm on a hook. You’re caught; now be a man and tell us what we’d be in for if we followed the orders that so conveniently rely on you and your company.”

Frankum rallied a nasty laugh, choked off by MacGruder’s hand against his throat. “Inconvenient fools, the lot of you.”

“We’re inconvenient? So we die with the mission?”

“Why do you think there are so many of you?” he spit. “How many men do you think are required to move that damn crawler and haul the fuel to keep it rolling? Not the thirty you’ve got. It could be done with a dozen.”

“So this is a death sentence? For being inconvenient?” MacGruder squeezed harder at Frankum’s throat, twisting his fingers in the fabric of the man’s coat collar. “I know that they want me silenced, and I know why; but the rest of these men are innocent.”

“And expendable.”

Henry, gone pale with pain but still standing, cleared his throat. “They’re part of the weapon. That’s it, isn’t it? They’re supposed to be the first wave of the walking plague after they loose the gas upon the city.”

Frankum nodded, insofar as he was able.

Captain MacGruder asked, “But then why are you here? Why send the ship along? To make sure we finish the job? To watch us die?”

“To set off the weapon. But you know that!”

“And why else? Why else, goddammit!”

“To observe,” Frankum squeaked. “To observe and report, and make sure that you do your jobs without … any…” His face was turning red, but he forced out the last word anyway. “Interference!”

“From people like them?” MacGruder waved a hand toward Maria and Henry.

“From … anyone…”

The captain released his grip. Frankum’s knees folded, and he dropped to the ground, feeling at his throat as if to make certain he was still in one piece. MacGruder stalked back toward his nearest lieutenant and said, “We’re stopping here. We wait for Bradley to come back with word from Washington, and then we’ll reevaluate. And those three”—he pointed balefully at the cargo ship’s crew and captain—“are staying right here with us. Tie them up and throw them into the crawler. If they want to watch the bomb that badly, they can sit on top of it.”

“No!” Frankum objected, loudly and suddenly. “No, you can’t do that!”

“Why’s that?”

“Because … because…” He swore under his breath, yanked off his hat, and threw it at the ground in a gesture of protest. “Because the damn thing won’t hold much longer.”

“It’ll hold, so long as no one blasts it from the air. None of our crew has anything big enough to set it off. We’ll need your ship’s turret gun for that.”

“No, no, you won’t. We’re here with our ship to shoot the thing and set it off—that’s true; I swear it’s true,” he said, hands aloft again, protesting innocence. “But we’re running so late, and there’s the failsafe built in…”

“Failsafe?”

He cleared his throat. “An accidental failsafe, really. The bomb is too hard to control—it isn’t stable. Once it’s set and armed, it has half a day before the gas corrodes the interior components.” He was speaking quickly now. “Half a day, while the gas eats the metal like acid. If we don’t detonate it as planned, it’ll go off on its own.”

“Half a day?”

“We haven’t got another two hours to wait for your messenger,” Frankum insisted. “We may not have one. If you want to follow orders, Captain MacGruder,” he said, trying to keep a sour note out of his voice, and only succeeding because he sounded so afraid, “there’s still time to get Maynard to … to the edge of Atlanta. The gas will settle, spread, and roam anyway; precision in this regard was never very important.”

“Oh, God,” the captain said, though how he meant it, Maria wasn’t certain.

“Follow your orders. Finish the mission, and, and, and we’ll fit all of you into our craft somehow. We’ll get all of you out of here safe and sound, I swear it on my mother’s grave. We can take you out of the blast range—which isn’t far: the gas does the damage, not the detonation, and the gas is heavy. It’ll stay low, and we’ll go high. Just … you can’t keep us here. None of us can stay here much longer, that’s what I’m saying. And that’s the truth—that’s the God’s honest truth, and I swear it.”

MacGruder returned his attention to Maria and Henry—who by now had slid down into a seated position. He’d recovered a little of his coloring, but still looked weak. “Do either of you know how far this gas can travel? How much space it can cover?”

Maria put her hand on Henry’s shoulder. “No one knows. It’ll roam like a cloud, killing everything it touches until it dissipates.”

The captain looked mad enough to chew nails and spit tacks. But he couldn’t afford to lose his temper in front of his men, not at a moment like this, when the nervous chatter was whispering its way to a crescendo of frightened soldiers, the rumor fleeing back and forth along the caravan to anyone who wasn’t present to witness the exchange.

“All right,” he said, his teeth grinding against the words. “Apparently we don’t have time to fulfill our mission objective; we’ll never make the air base in Atlanta with this cargo, not now. These guys,” he said, with regards to Frankum and his crew, “aren’t going anywhere without us. And we’re not going anywhere without them. Evans,” he said to a uniformed soldier standing by. “Get me that map from the front car. We’ve got to find someplace to dump this. Sanders—” He signaled someone else. “As per my original request, I want these three tied up and stuck in the crawler with the bomb.”

“But Captain—”

“Not another word out of you. We don’t have time to wait for Bradley, which means we’re acting on faith. Now, the rest of you—in teams, as we talked about before—start digging. We need those wheels free in less time than it’d take you piss by the road, or else we’re all dead men.” He turned to Maria and Henry, then gave Henry a second, appraising gaze. “He’s not looking so well. We don’t have a doctor, but we can put him in a cart so he can rest.”

Maria looked down at Henry, who indeed seemed on the very verge of fainting. “Henry, I think you’d better let them help you,” she said wearily.

“No, I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not. Here, someone get him up,” she pleaded, and MacGruder nodded toward one of his fellows. As Henry was lifted up and assisted to someplace more comfortable, Maria turned to the captain and said, “You’re doing the right thing.”

“At present, I’m only making a go of it.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“No.” Evans returned with a map roll. MacGruder took it and stretched it out across the back of a crate they’d pulled down off the crawler, hoping to lighten the load. He weighed down the paper with a rock on one side, and his fist on the other. It was a detailed production, with known farms, small towns, and topographical features all marked out. With his free hand, the captain traced out the particulars as he spoke. “We’re right about here,” he told her—and Evans, too, who lingered at his side. “Still a good forty miles from Atlanta, but there are a few little towns between here and there. And behind us, too.”

“What about … what about a lake?” Evans asked, pointing down at a wide, oval-shaped spot to the east. “We could drag it out to a lake, and toss it inside. Maybe the water would, I don’t know … hold down the worst of the gas?”

The captain shook his head. “Not a bad idea, but that’s six miles out, seven maybe. Through the trees, with no road to take us there.”

“Not a lake, then…” Maria scanned the sheet, helping hold the corner near the captain’s fist and accidentally leaving a smudge of blood on it. Her hands ached terribly, but what could she do? “What’s this right here? Is that what it looks like? A cave?”

“A cave … yes, I think so. And it’s close.”

“Then let’s pray it’s deep, too. If so, then, captain … we may have our answer!”

He double-checked the location and let go of the map. Maria let go, too, and it curled shut around the rock. To Evans, the captain said, “Take the fastest horse we have left and go back to that little town a mile or two behind us. It was just a wide spot in the road, but they had a store.”

“What am I getting, sir?”

“Dynamite. As much as they’ll sell you.”

“I don’t have any money, sir.”

“Then run up into the cargo ship and take whatever money you find. I doubt the Baldwin-Felts boys travel without any cash.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he was off.

MacGruder returned his attention to the crawler, which now had the three agents perched atop it, looking none too happy. “How’s the digging?”

Without looking up, a soldier answered, “Another five minutes. Someone get inside and start the thing, would you?”

“Thomson, that’s you. Crank it up. Davis, get me four or five crate lids. Pry them off and bring them over here. We’re going to stick them under the wheels for traction.” Then, to Maria, he said, “It’s the cave or nothing at this point. We’ll toss it down as far as it’ll fall, and blow the top to keep it covered. I don’t know if it’ll hold all the gas,” he confessed to her, more quietly than he’d said the rest. “But it’ll buy us time, if nothing else.”

She put a hand on his arm. “That’ll do. When the war’s over, the president can send the army engineers to take a look at it.”

The great rolling-crawler rumbled to life behind them. Up in the cabin, Thomson wrestled with the gears, working the engine back and forth between first gear and reverse, trying to rock the thing free. On the sixth try it scooted. Its wheels caught on the crate lids and ground them to splinters … but under Thomson’s expert handling, it skidded to the left a few feet, spewing smoke and chips of wood from the crate lids as it hauled itself up, out, and onto the road once more.

The men cheered, and the machine jerked to a stop once it was clear. The road ahead was full of ruts, but the first hurdle was mastered, and it was time to proceed.

Over the engine, the captain shouted, “Move! Move everything—the carts, the horses, the other cars, everything! Get them out of the way; leave ’em on the side of the road if you have to. Now! This is all we’re taking!” he announced.

“Captain!” Frankum cried. “I can feel it moving underneath us; it’s going to blow! You have to get us down! Let us run so we have a fair chance!”

“Like the one you were going to give us? Forget it,” he told them. “That’s just the engine you feel. The bomb is fine for now.”

“I can hear it,” he insisted. “A hissing noise … a hissing.…”

“Shut your mouth, Frankum, or I’ll shut it for you. Cross your fingers and say your prayers, and maybe you’ll survive long enough for a court-martial. Thomson, Sanders, you’re with me. Davis, when Evans gets back, tell him where we’ve gone,” he said, then detailed the cave’s location—not far down the road. “We’ll turn off and try to work this damn thing between the trees—we’ll knock a few down if we have to, and we might. The cave is only a few hundred yards off the road, if I read the map correctly.”

“Don’t forget about me,” Maria said.

“Ma’am?”

“Me. I’m coming with you.”

“There’s room behind the driver. Get in.”

She climbed on board, and as the crawler lurched forward—struggling with the road, but winning, this time—they passed the cart where Henry was resting. He waved as she went, his good hand offering a weak salute. She waved back, swallowing the lump in her throat and wondered if he’d make it back across the line. She didn’t know how badly he was hurt. There might have been more wrong than she could see.

She put a hand to her torso, where the puncture wound had stopped bleeding, but was hurting fiercely all the same. It was one of the only places on her body where she was warm enough to feel anything at all.

Maria watched Frankum and his men over her shoulder as they bounced, slid, and finally rolled down to the cart’s bottom. When they disappeared, she first thought they’d been thrown—but no, they were wedged firmly in place between the bomb and the rails that kept it on the cart.

She smiled.

MacGruder gave her a look that asked her what was worth smiling over. She pointed down into the cart to indicate that their foes weren’t going anywhere. “Maybe we should toss them in with the bomb,” he suggested.

“Maybe, but your court-martial idea was probably better. Our side isn’t ruled by pirates or scoundrels, Captain. You have to play fair. On the bright side, maybe one of them will make a run for it, and you can shoot him.”

Now he smiled back. “A man can dream.”

The crawler heaved and hauled them up over the road’s raggedy bits with a motion like a ship in terrible seas. Maria found it worse than flying, even in the stormy air they’d navigated thus far that day; but she clutched her seat and—as they traversed one particularly bad pothole—the captain who sat beside her.

“There!” he called out. At first Maria thought it was a strange reaction to being grabbed by a woman, but that wasn’t his point at all. He was looking off to the right, where a dirt road passed between the trees.

The crawler shuddered to an idling stop. Thomson asked over his shoulder, “Sir, you think this is it?”

“It’s about right, so far as the map goes. If it doesn’t take us right to the spot, it’ll get us close, and there will be fewer trees to mow down. Just take the turn, if we can make it.”

“Oh, I can make the turn. I’m just not sure we can make that road. It’s barely big enough for a pair of horses.”

“Try it and see. We’re out of plans, and we’re running out of time,” he said.

He was right, and Maria knew it. The Baldwin-Felts men might have been hysterical, but that didn’t mean they were wrong. She could hear it, too, behind her: a different frequency of hum—an off-beat vibration that drummed up against her spine. The bomb’s integrity was failing. The jostle of the rolling-crawler couldn’t be helping matters, and it only grew worse when the vehicle turned right in a slow, perilous arc, then began its passage between the trees on a road even worse than the one it was leaving.

Maria thought it wasn’t possible for the ride to get any rougher, but she’d been wrong before, and here was another fine example.

“Get your head down!” MacGruder ordered her—and perhaps the rest of the men, though she took it personally.

He was right to make the command, as the trees at the road’s edge had sharp, low branches. Their limbs were bare and cold, and they whipped viciously against the crawler and its occupants. Maria huddled down low, ducking as far as she could behind Thomson, who valiantly held the thing steady and forced it forward, ever forward, in the lowest gear imaginable.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Sanders shouted.

“It can barely go this fast!” Thomson replied, jerking the steering wheel as it reeled against him, the wheels having snapped against some dip that threatened to trap them. “But if we stop, we’re damned! We’ll never get it moving again!”

So they fought onward, their bones rattling with every turn of the wheels. With each foot the weapon behind them grew a little weaker, a little louder. A little harder to ignore.

“That must be it!” Thomson hollered, pointing at a pair of structures no bigger than shacks. He drew the crawler up close beside them, and let the motor rumble.

One of the shacks was barely a roof on timbers, a covering for a hole in the ground. The structure beside it had a sign out front that said, CUMBERLAND CAVERNS! ONE CENT PER PERSON! SEE THE WONDER! AT YOUR OWN RISK! SUPPLIES AVAILABLE!

“Someone’s selling visits to the cave?” MacGruder wondered aloud.

“It’s not uncommon,” Maria informed him. “But it’s deserted now,” she said aloud, to herself more than anyone else. “It must be.”

“Thomson, get the back of this thing as close to that hole as you can manage!”

“Yes, sir! You get out and guide me. I’ll do my best!” he vowed.

MacGruder flung himself over the side and went to the rear, hollering instructions and giving whatever guidance he could—and finally the crawler was positioned with its back deck beneath the overhang, almost immediately above the open hole below.

“That’s as close as you’re going to get!” the captain called, and made a throat-cutting gesture that told Thomson to stop the motor.

When he did, the crawler fell silent, except for the pops and pings of the engine cooling almost immediately in the bitter air. But the forest wasn’t perfectly quiet, even without its raucous growling. The crisp afternoon was interrupted by the slow hiss, sizzle, and creak of the Maynard bomb shifting in its housing.

“Captain…” begged Frankum. “You have to let us go!”

“And I will,” MacGruder told them. He reached into his boot and pulled out a knife, then leaned into the compartment and cut the ropes that bound Frankum and his men. “Get out now. You’re going to help us shove this goddamn thing into that goddamn hole.”

The Baldwin-Felts men agreed to this immediately. They might as well. There was no time to run.

They climbed out of the rear and rubbed at the sore spots on their wrists as Sanders untied the ropes that held the tarp over the awful device.

When he was finished with the knots, he whipped the sheet away, revealing the monstrous creation: a smooth, elongated box with round edges, banded with steel and rivets. Its nose was fixed with gleaming copper plate, and in its tail lurked a vast tangle of tubes, coils, and wires. Three tanks were mounted atop it, side by side like pig iron from the smelter. These tanks were the source of the hissing, the creaking, and other ominous sounds of something tight beginning to split under pressure.

It horrified Maria to her very core. This object could kill millions, if the weather was right. A terrific device, indeed, intimidating on the outside, even without ever releasing its deadly power. But compared to what it was capable of … it looked deceptively small. Nothing that could fit on the back of a crawler should be able to wipe out a city.

Frankum also stood staring, without speaking, until he said what Maria was already wondering. “I don’t know if we can lift it, Captain—just us men, and her,” he said. “We haven’t the strength between us, not even if we had a team of horses!”

“You idiot, the back of this thing is on a hydraulic lift. It was built to carry and dump construction supplies,” the captain said. He gave Thomson a signal, and a different motor kicked to life—something quieter and smoother, but still wildly loud in the otherwise silent woods. With painful slowness, the back compartment rose, tilting the bomb by tiny, incremental degrees. “We won’t have to pick it up and carry it; we’ll just have to climb in and give it a push, until it starts to roll.”

As predicted, the crawler’s bed wouldn’t go high enough to let the bomb drop of its own accord, so all the men climbed in behind it. Maria stayed on the ground at their insistence—partly for all the usual thickheaded reasons, she was sure; but partly because space was limited, and there was only room for the strongest bodies.

The men braced themselves and pressed their feet against the bomb, and while Maria crossed her fingers and prayed, they shoved with all their might, rocking the big device back and forth like Thomson had rocked the crawler itself to get it moving.

They strained, swore, sweated, and pushed. The grade of the crawler’s bed was so steep that Maria tried not to worry about what would happen if they just toppled right in after it.

Finally, Maynard wiggled.

It creaked back and forth, just moving by inches at first. Hardly noticeable at all. Then it rocked. Then it rolled, tumbled, dropped.

And fell.

Right into the cave, careening with the weight of a city’s dead, crashing through the earth and settling down somewhere below, farther than any of them could see when they scrambled after it to stare into the hole.

“Where is it?” Frankum asked, leaning over so far that Maria was tempted, for one nasty second, to give him a shove. The pirate soul she harbored within her corset objected to her decency, but now was not the time or the place. Like she’d told the captain, they had to play fair. After all, they were not alone. Soon, the world would be watching. And someone had to save it.

The captain said, “No idea. Too dark. Anyone have a light?”

“Just the lantern on the crawler, and I can’t pry that off without my tools,” Thomson told them.

Echoing up from below, the sound of failing machinery grew louder as it bounced and rose off the rocks.

Behind them they heard the telltale clomp and clatter of a horse’s hooves. Maria guessed that it was Evans with the dynamite, and it was indeed him, carrying a promising pack on his back.

“Hurry up with that!” the captain yelled, and Evans did his level best.

He yanked the horse to a sliding stop and dropped off the saddle to his feet, tossing the pack to the captain. “Wire it up, sir! I’ve got the line and pump in the saddlebags.”

The captain went to work immediately, with Frankum lending a useful hand—for once in his life, Maria added disparagingly in her head. But it was his life, too; his, and theirs, and everyone else’s. So he planted the sticks, threaded the wire, and ran with the rest of them back to the far side of the crawler—where Evans had already secured the horse, as far from the trouble as he could put the poor animal.

The captain paused while he checked the settings and connections on the pump, then set it on the ground.

Evans turned his nose to the air. “Sir … do you smell that?”

He did. He must be able to—Maria could smell it, even though her nose was so cold she couldn’t feel it when she wiped it with the back of her scraped-up hands.

It was a toxic smell: rotten eggs and ruin, sharp death and troubled sleep. It stank of chemicals and poison, and it grew stronger while they sat there, mulling it over and wondering what could possibly smell that way?

The captain shook it off first, that numbing, stupefying creep of confusion and curiosity.

He shoved the plunger. A jolt went down the wire, along the ground, and into the hole.

And the earth exploded.